something that i've always i think i've have i struggled with it i don't know something that always annoys me is thinking that managers have to motivate their team and you know you have to motivate your team members and how do i motivate and i'm always thinking i had a conversation with someone about this one he's like well of course and i'm saying well i think that self-motivation is very strong and sometimes what's happening is we're dampening people's motivation so i always wanted to i always wanted to write a book called get out of the way which was all how as a team leader as a manager the main thing was for you to get out of the way and let people do their job but of course i don't think that would sell very much because to tell a manager that the thing they have to get out of the way it's not i don't know we all think we want to make a difference with our people so i don't know i've got some lots of thoughts around this but what is your first thinking about around this when i say that it makes me a little nervous well because as a we've talked about before as an individual contributor your work is you know you like you bang the hammer you make the thing and you see it at the end of it right like you can directly see the output of your work because that's what you do and then as a manager you no longer get that direct output but you sort of get an indirect one over a longer period where you can see the influence of your work through the work of the people you're managing if you then have to say well you know really what you should be doing is just getting out of their way because you're like okay so i'm starting to have to squint very hard to see what value i'm adding here i can't do it myself and i can't help them do it and in fact they do it better if i'm not there i don't know no but i'm really talking specifically about motivation here so you do but i think yeah so i'm not writing that book don't worry uh our listeners so nice to see you here at the management cafe we are well we just started the conversation so you're very welcome to to join us my name is pilar and with me is as always having his cup of tea uh tim and we are going to be here for about 20 minutes and well i don't know where this will lead us as always but starting with this concept of whether we should be focusing on motivating others however before we go a little bit into that i want to pick up on what you were saying about going from being in a job especially when you've transitioned into a position of management that you come from seeing the fruits of your labor and that being motivated to then having to shift to talking about inner motivation to another way of motivating yourself another way of being rewarded and i was talking with bob glaser for another podcast for 21st century work life and he said becoming a leader means changing all your reward centers from getting rewarded for what you do to getting rewarded for the performance of your team so i can see how saying to someone all you need to do to have a great team is to get out of the way is difficult on many levels not just on a practical but actually an internal one as well well let's let's begin to this concept of what you mean by by getting out of the way yeah because i think you know i might be misinterpreting it maybe it's open to misinterpretation because that principle that bob's talking about the idea that you win through them winning i think is a really wonderful attribute as a manager if you see your success as being a subset or an out like a result of the team's success i think that's aligning you in a really positive direction and i also think it's very helpful for the team members for individuals to know that their manager cares about them and cares about their state of mind and their level of engagement not from a point of view of like it always has to be this and we're always trying to jump up a couple percentage points but rather that if you're feeling flat and and you want someone to carry you for a bit i'm here for that you know if you're feeling buoyant and you want to celebrate your success with i'm here for that and that's part of the manager's role i think is to is to accompany people in that journey in a way that's helpful for the people i agree i agree with all of that my issue is with the i mentioned with the word motivation and motivating because you haven't used that word um specifically which i think what you're talking about is some kind of companionship in a way so just and also i think that the point you made about knowing that someone does care about the fact that whether they're engaged and whether they are motivated so that for me the caring is important what i really like is when we look at motivation and is what what is and we're talking about intrinsic for me i'm talking about intrinsic motivation so that drive to do your best just because you want to do a good job i am quite a theory person because i like what the frameworks do to it the self-determination theory which basically says people are intrinsically motivated to be their best but the context gets in the way and i'm wondering whether sometimes and of course this is very context specific as everything we talk about whether sometimes as a manager with two we're looking too much into why how can i help this person be more motivated rather than think what is getting in the way of this person being motivated and focus on that and that is what i mean by getting in the way that if we go from the point that my job is my job is not to get out of the way it's to remove obstacles and sometimes i'm the obstacle so i think that the phrasing needs to be different so if we look at it like that then if our job is to help to create the conditions so that people's inner motivation thrives i think it's a very different mindset to oh i must motivate i must help these people be motivated yeah yeah it's a great distinction and i agree i love that concept of providing the conditions for people because i agree with you that if you think oh i'm gonna if i prod them there then they're gonna they're gonna go in this direction like that's too manipulative it doesn't necessarily work because motivation is a very personal thing and i remember uh going to a talk where a guy he drew up like nine different things that might motivate people in the workplace you know and it was things like you know achievement money status camaraderie center purpose like all of these different things and what he said was actually for any one person at any one time one of these things might be more important to them than the other ones but they're all sort of there and and they change you know it might be that money's really important for someone but then later on it's purpose uh and i thought that a really helpful sort of vision to hold because it meant that there are lots of different levers for an individual and also for you as a manager there's lots of different ways that you can help people find what they need to you know feel like they want to do good work the fact that that changes and especially throughout life throughout your career as your own personal context changes and i think that sometimes maybe it might be more useful to be curious about what motivates someone rather than trying to motivate them where i think that the whole helping with that motivation thing might come in where i think it might be useful is in helping people sometimes gain some sense of perspective that's the only time i think that when if someone is struggling if someone is getting disengaged and we can see that to approach that coaching approach of let's let's see where we can find out what is going on and let's see whether you can do something about it and i can be here to help you see a different perspective or you know um that's the only time that i think oh actually then well it might be useful to do that to be a bit more probing in that way but i don't know yeah for sure i think it's also helpful to i mean this is part of this of getting out of the way you don't always have to fix the problem and in fact sometimes that can be counterproductive because if someone is feeling demotivated you know their project has got cancelled or they're at the part of the project where they're doing testing and they hate testing so it's boring and if you come in and go come on let's give it the old you know give it the old team atmosphere and let's let's smash this out like if it's boring you're not going to change that and it's okay to have a period where your motivation is a little bit low it's going to change and so i think being real about that just recognizing at times is good it's you know authentic uh and let's say we all have periods where our motivation can be uh can be less than other times but one of the roles that a manager can play and you know lots of different people in our lives can play this role for us as well is they can help you reframe because sometimes what happens is we get demotivated for a particular reason and we can sort of get fixated on that and you know sort of lose the forest for the trees something will happen lose our sense of purpose or you know we won't get promoted into the role we want or you know we'll give our big presentation and the boss won't think it's amazing and you know and we think life's terrible and in those scenarios it can be helpful to have someone manager being one of those people who can help us reframe how we're feeling what we're focusing on put it into a bigger container where it's more balanced yeah that's the sense of perspective sometimes yeah just reframe change yeah how we're looking at stuff so basically just be that outside eye sometimes i think yeah and i think that's much more useful than like you say because i always think that when we look at motivation that the the inspirational side of getting someone motivated comes up where actually that is like you say sometimes that doesn't help at all also going back to the providing that context is to really understand that the environment as well in which we are all working so the organizational level at a task level and what are the things that we can put in place that we only us can do as well i think that this comes to really understanding what the role of the manager is and how they are supporting the team and that of course goes sometimes way beyond how am i supporting the team members individually but also the advocacy organization getting resources and all of that i think sometimes that looking at motivation and for example if it's decreasing in a team because sometimes also these things are contagious instead of how do i motivate my team is okay what is happening around us and is there anything i can do that only i can do in this team as well i think that might be quite also a way of looking at it yeah it uh i really thought about it from that perspective it's sort of like looking at what's the root cause of of this so if i go back to self-determination theory i just find it so helpful because for me it applies to every situation and we think that if we don't have a sense of autonomy competence and relatedness if any of those three are not there then our motivation suffers we have less drive to do our best so if we're looking at it and thinking right why in the context is preventing people from feeling what's interesting because it's the sense of not the reality what in this context prevents people from feeling that autonomy from feeling that competence and that relatedness and it could be that there's something that we can do that would feed one of those and of course i'm not saying don't understand what is really going on i'm just i'm really being very general about it but sometimes we can look at the context through that lens rather than oh what can i say to this individual for them to be more motivated yeah that makes a lot of sense i think it's a really helpful way to unpack it because you're trying to understand where they're at but also understand what might be causing them to be in that state and it takes a lot of trust because and what i like again about this theory is that what it's saying is look everyone wants to do their best and i think that's usually the case maybe some you know there's always a stupid percentage that don't but general and this is this instead of trying to fix what's going on badly we're trying to create conditions for it to thrive so i like that perspective but you've got to come from a point of trusting that the person does want to do their best which sometimes is not easy yeah oh you'll get your heart broken from time to time with that but it's worth it yeah i absolutely agree and that that's a big that's a fundamental mind shift change is i basically believe that people want to do a good job i remember there was a whole thing with like remote work and oh how do you know that they're actually working like most people want to do like they get you know what can be a productive place for them to get a sense of uh sense of you know having achieved stuff you know people like to do good work they like to feel like they're making a difference and you don't have to overthink that if you're putting them in a situation where they where their work sucks and they hate it okay then maybe they aren't going to work all the time because they don't put it uh but i guess that's exactly what you're talking about is if you provide the right conditions for them to feel you know just remove things that can prevent that natural motivation from taking over then you're a lot of the way there there's one other thought that i want to give because i like with motivation i like framework specifically i'm not a very frameworky person but for motivation i am because motivation is so weird and so willy and so big and it's got so many dimensions to it that i find that framing it within something helps but i saw another interesting model um which talked about looking at motivation through the lens of the head the heart and the hand and i think that going back to uh reframing and helping people in perspective and just taking that coaching approach when someone is struggling and then someone actually someone might come to you and say i'm not very motivated recently and or something you might pick up and i like that is this task really important to me and relevant to my goal i think that's a really interesting thing to help people see uh do i enjoy this task and am i good at this task as well so again sometimes what people need to to get through something when they're struggling and when they're like no i can't be bothered to do this actually it might be a question of competence it might be a question of thinking i'm not good at it and rather than a pep talk what we need is to give that person the the practical support they need i like the model and i like i like the simplicity of it it i guess i'm naturally a little skeptical of something that's so simple because for example one of the things that i think people find most motivating is looking back at struggle after it's led to success i don't know how to use excel i've never been able to do this before this is really hard oh i've worked it out hey i've done it and then all of that struggle becomes reframed as look at the effort that i put in in order to achieve this you know within the context of this you know you look at the hand am i good at this task no i'm not good at this task but if i can carry my motivation enough to to get over that hump of struggle then the bump of motivation you know the burst of motivation i get from it from that achievement is is super powerful yeah well am i good at this task i would put it in competence which is also about am i good at this task or am i learning through this task as well because it is very demotivating to be doing something and not getting anywhere with it and i think that this point of feeling very competent at the end of it especially if there's been a struggle i think it's really important and again that might be something that that needs that outside eye to help people see either as they're going through that journey or later on and and helping that so i think that just because my coffee is uh it's getting cold so i think just as a one of my final thoughts is that when we're thinking about our role in this motivating others or helping people stay motivated i think that the coaching approach is the most useful one rather than the inspirational approach because it's about helping people reframe and understand what's going on themselves you Absolutely. And I think something that managers should innately be able to help people with, particularly about reframing, is providing context and the sort of idea of zooming in and zooming out. Again, a simple framework. But something that I found really helpful was if I'm totally overwhelmed, if I'm totally overwhelmed, then it all feels too big, then I zoom in.
I zoom in on the very smallest detail. And so if I can shrink the task down to one little thing, I can achieve that. And then that sense of overwhelm, I can sort of push it out and reframe it. But when I'm feeling the opposite, when I'm feeling like I struggle or I can't make progress, then zooming out puts it into a broader context.
In that example, if somebody's trying to learn something new, but they're finding it difficult, the opportunity the manager has to sort of, particularly as a perfectionist person, where they're like, oh, I'm doing this. It's not to the level that I want it to be, or the level I know it can be at. They start beating themselves up about it or they feel unmotivated. And the opportunity for the manager to reframe that as, hey, this is just practice.
We're just learning here. We're expecting to make mistakes. Not that it's okay. We're actually, if we're not making mistakes, then we're not quite trying it enough.
So we knew we were going to try and do things that we were going to get a little sloppy at times, because we're trying something new. And that's a wonderful way to sort of carry somebody or support them through that period of struggle. Nice. Well, listeners around the table, we'd love to hear your approach.
And whether this is something that you think about, that you don't think about really, that you have some ways of dealing with, whether you're a get-out-of-the-way person, whether you look at the context, whether you actually like to be there helping people with their motivation. This is such an important reflection point about our leadership style, I think, as well, understanding how we're engaging with this. So managementcafepodcast at gmail.com. Managementcafepodcast.com, you can use the contact form there.
So, well, coffee's over for us. Now it's over for you. Thank you for joining us at the Management Cafe. Remember, you can subscribe to the show on whatever podcast app you use to make sure you get your weekly dose of reflection.
Our website is management.caf, and on Twitter we are at managementcaf. That's all for this episode from myself, Ylaro Orti, and our fellow co-hosts, Tim Burgess. Thank you for listening.